So he’s gonna hold America’s infrastructure hostage, right, over the issue of investigations[.]

What’s being held hostage, exactly? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), just minutes before a scheduled meeting in which Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY), and Republican leadership were to negotiate infrastructure projects, Pelosi, with Schumer’s prior agreement and support, accused Trump of impeachable behavior. The only plausible reason for the timing of Pelosi’s accusation was to blow up those negotiations. Progressive-Democrats didn’t want those negotiations to go forward; they didn’t want Trump to look good against the backdrop of election season and their efforts to make him look bad during this season with their faux investigations.

President Donald Trump has said that he’ll do infrastructure negotiations and legislation after the Progressive-Democrats end their investigations of his administration, not before. Pointing out House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D, CA) bad faith approach (my term, not Trump’s) to any such negotiations, he said that

he had watched House Speaker Nancy Pelosi…accuse him of a “coverup” in remarks to reporters shortly before their scheduled infrastructure meeting at the White House.

[O]n May 1, New York’s state Senate voted to let strikers get benefits one week after walking off the job—essentially putting them on equal footing with those who are laid off.
If Governor Andrew Cuomo signs this bill, he’ll effectively be using New York’s unemployment-insurance program to subsidize union strikes, upending the balance of power between workers and management.

Union strikes are little indistinguishable from extortion, except that they’re legal. They’re used to threaten a company’s ability to function—to survive—unless they surrender to union demands. “Nice little business you got here. Be too bad if something was to happen to it.”

…and one Progressive-Democrat’s tax proposal. Although, the fact is that these effects aren’t unique to Senator and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren (D, NM): the trend of effects are the outcomes of all the Progressive-Democratic Party’s proposals, differing only in detail.

Warren’s particular proposal is to tax business profits above $100 million at 7%. Here are some outcomes of such a thing, according to the Tax Foundation, with the FoxBusiness cited. A tax like this would

reduce incentives to invest, so GDP would shrink by ~1.9% over the long-term

There Ought to be a Law was the title of an old Reader’s Digest humor column: every little pet peeve came in for a jokingly recommended law barring it. Because More Government is always the solution.

Barton Swaim, in his Wall Street Journalop-ed, actually takes that seriously, and he wants to apply it to the idea of States and cities offering businesses tax incentives to get them to build in those jurisdictions. He wants the Federal government to…regulate…what those State and local jurisdictions can do to entice businesses.

Senator and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris (D, CA) wants the Federal government to pay a significant fraction of public school teachers’ salaries.

What a terrible idea.

The Federal government paying a significant fraction of public school teachers’ salaries means Federal government control of our public schools. Those schools are in enough trouble; we don’t need the Feds getting in the way, also.

Aside from that, this is just another Progressive-Democratic Party attempt to grab our money, this time to deny it to our heirs. Again.

Sam Adolphsen, Foundation for Government Accountability’s Vice President of Executive Affairs, writing for Fox Business, commented on that in a piece about Medicaid’s work requirement in Arkansas—about which Progressive-Democrats in Congress are in an uproar.

Those Progressive-Democrats have complained that work requirements

“threaten[]” Americans…work [is] a “restrictive condition.”

These politicians of the Left ignore two things. One is the trivial one: no one is forcing anyone to work; the only “restriction” is that, in order to get any of Arkansas’ OPM, recipients must go to work in Arkansas or make a good faith effort to do so.

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TANSTAAFL

2 + 2 = 4
--Polish proverb

Be not intimidated... nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice.
--John Adams

Nothing in the universe has a shorter half-life than a politician's memory for inconvenient facts.
--Admiral Hamish Alexander, RMN

Dawn is nature's way of telling you to go to bed.
And to just stay there until the evil yellow disk is gone again.
--Anonymous

In a polity, each citizen is to possess his own arms, which are not supplied or owned by the state.
--Aristotle

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
--Chief Justice John Roberts.

A yawn is a silent scream for coffee.
--Shane Mclean

If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six hours sharpening my ax.
--Abraham Lincoln

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Who is this Pogue?

I'm a USAF vet, a quasi-retired Systems Engineer, and writer. In my spare time, I turn exotic woods into piles of sawdust and kindling, out of which occasionally sticks a piece of furniture that doesn't look too bad from a distance, with my glasses off.
Oh, and I have a rather dyspeptic view of Big Government.

Contact

eehines1473 -at- yahoo dot com

The image in the header is from NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity on its 11-year anniversary on the Red Planet. [I]t has used its Pancam (fancy name for its panoramic camera) to snap this wide view from atop "Cape Tribulation," a part of Endeavour Crater's rim that sits at a height of 440 feet. That's 80 percent of the height of the Washington Monument, NASA says.

The photo was taken on January 6 and released by NASA January 22, 2015.